‘Rapid construction programme’
January 2020

MX curtain walling from TECHNAL was used across the elevations of a residential project in the centre of Birmingham completed on a restricted site and to ‘an unusually rapid construction programme’ using offsite manufacturing procedures to reduce time on site.

Wolverhampton based Breakwells Glass was awarded its £1.2 million contract to design, supply and install the MX52 Visible Grid curtain walling on the 18-storey Lansdowne House at One Hagley Road.

Crucial to the main contractor’s winning tender, however, was a rethink from in-situ construction to a precast concrete solution, which placed special demands on its supply chain including just a 60 minute delivery window available for units to be off-loaded directly to the required locations. 

Thanks to Interserve’s site management, including use of electronic scheduling technology and Breakwells’ planning of transport from its own factory 25 miles away – as well as glazing suppliers in Scotland – one floor of the building was completed every fortnight throughout the build period in 2017 to 2018.

The ‘critical path’ for the project even included waterproofing one of the upper intermediate floor decks in order to permit the apartments below to be plastered and fully fitted out; while the MX Curtain Wall with FY open-out windows provided immediate weatherproofing to the elevations as well as long-term energy efficiency. 

All the windows were glazed with 28.4mm units containing a 6mm SGG Planatherm 1-ii Low-E outer leaf with black, warm edge spacer in the 16mm argon filled cavity, then a 6.4mm Planiclear laminated inner pane. This offers a centre pane U-value of 1.0 W/m2 K and a G-value of 0.49.

Director David Breakwell, said: “We have been using Technal’s systems for 30 years and had previously supplied and installed numerous flagship developments for Interserve such as the business school for Wolverhampton and the Alumno student accommodation development in Leamington Spa establishing good working relationships – proving influential in securing this job.

“Due to the accelerated build programme we were having to keep pace with the installation of the precast wall units – extending the mast-climbers and adhering to the one hour window for our just-in-time van deliveries. It was also necessary to plan the installations in with the working arc of the tower crane’s position.”